Can a wrecked party with a toxic brand make a difference? Mitch McConnell thinks so

GEORGE BUSH passed on two batons last week. Barack Obama succeeded him as the most powerful man in the world. Mitch McConnell succeeded him as the most powerful man in the Republican Party. The former handover generated, reportedly, 35,000 news stories in a single day. The latter, not so many. Not only is Mr McConnell, the Senate minority leader, far less important than Mr Obama. He is also far less comfortable in the spotlight. Scan a photo of the inauguration and you can just make him out, standing a few rows back from the new president. He looks grey, owlish, bespectacled and glum. If the Republicans are looking for a jolt of inspiration and a fresh face to lead them into battle, Mr McConnell is not their man. But it would be a mistake to underestimate him.

As a child, he overcame polio. In his early 40s, after a series of low-profile political jobs, he ran for the Senate from his home state of Kentucky. The incumbent Democrat, Dee Huddleston, looked tough to dislodge. But Mr McConnell ran wickedly entertaining campaign ads showing bloodhounds sniffing around Washington for his opponent, who had missed votes to give paid speeches in balmy resorts. The ads also showed the hounds chasing Mr Huddleston up a tree as he tried to run away from his record. Mr McConnell ousted him by a handful of votes.

“My original ambition as a senator was to someday be known for something other than the bloodhound commercial,” said Mr McConnell recently, after being introduced with yet another retelling of the story. But unlike most of his colleagues in the Senate, Mr McConnell has never shown a glimmer of presidential ambition. He is happiest stitching together deals in the dark—and he is good at it. When he ran for the Republican leadership in the Senate in 2006 he campaigned entirely behind the scenes, quietly collecting pledges of support and scaring off potential rivals by discreetly showing them that they had no chance.

Since then, Mr McConnell has strewn the Democrats' path with barbed wire. Under Senate rules, a minority of 41 or more (out of 100 senators) can block nearly anything. Last year, with 49 seats, Republicans slowed the lawmaking process to a shuffle. This year, with only 41 seats (and one race, in Minnesota, still not settled), Republicans can thwart Mr Obama's agenda only if they remain perfectly united. That is always hard. So Mr McConnell talks of using a mixture of co-operation and filibuster threats to influence the way new bills are drafted. This makes a welcome contrast to Republicans in the House of Representatives who have no power to filibuster and therefore little influence. The big fuss they made this week about funding for family planning smacked of point-scoring. Mr Obama sounded like a grown-up when he conceded their point and moved on.

Mr McConnell says he welcomes Mr Obama's promise of “post-partisanship”. But he is not offering to surrender. He makes no secret of his unyielding hostility to some Democratic bills, such as the oddly-named Employee Free Choice Act, which would curb the right to a secret ballot before a workplace is unionised. Mr McConnell says this would “turn America into Europe”, and predicts a big political fight over it.

Yet Mr McConnell's call for bipartisanship is not a total sham. He has worked with Democrats before, not least to cobble together a bail-out of the financial sector last year. He is right that Congress will probably do a better job of tackling the economic crisis if Democrats and Republicans co-operate. He is right, too, if somewhat hypocritical, when he argues that taxpayers need a watchdog to stop interest groups from treating the stimulus bill like a second Christmas. “Everybody's making their list and checking it twice,” he tuts—though he has a long record of gift-wrapping taxpayers' cash for interest groups in his home state.

Some of his ideas are constructive. He wants a big chunk of the stimulus to come in the form of tax cuts. He wants to make federal cash for the states a loan, not a gift, so there is less chance it will be wasted. And when the immediate crisis is over, he wants both parties to sit down and work out how to curb the terrifying growth of entitlement spending (public pensions and health care). This makes sense. Since any plausible solution will hurt, neither party will take sole responsibility. Mr McConnell promises that Democrats “can expect more co-operation from Republicans than the last president received from them.”

A new face for the Grand Old Party?

A show of reasonableness might help Republicans repair their shredded reputation. But the task is immense. The party has been walloped in the past two elections. It has negligible support among young people and ethnic minorities. And its previously cutting-edge get-out-the-vote machine looks rusty and antiquated next to Mr Obama's. The task of rectifying all this will fall heavily on the new chairman of the Republican National Committee, who will be chosen this week.

The winner must be “ever-present” on television, says Jim Nicholson, who did the job in the late 1990s. The RNC chair has two main tasks besides raising money: to fire up the base and woo new voters; and the two are in tension. All six candidates say Ronald Reagan was their favourite Republican president. That thrills conservatives, but swing voters may wonder why Abraham Lincoln gets no mention. Encouragingly, two of the leading contenders are black. But one of them, Ken Blackwell, a failed gubernatorial candidate from Ohio, shows little interest in swing voters and tends to bang on about gays. The other, Michael Steele, a former lieutenant-governor of Maryland, has broader appeal. Handsome, moderate, the grandson of a sharecropper and the only candidate who doesn't own a gun, he looks good on television even to non-Republicans. His moderation may count against him with the party faithful. But if the Republicans want to be relevant again, they need a more inclusive faith.